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Showing posts from December 3, 2018

Recording user activties in a SQL table - an unwieldy amount of data?

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up vote 1 down vote favorite I've got an online application and I want to record key user events, such as when a user logged in, logged out, viewed certain record. For each of these interactions I can easily add a new row to a sql table with the user ID, event and timestamp, but won't I end up with an excessively large table pretty quickly? EG - 100,000 users, 10 logs per session on average - that's a million rows already? Is this a problem? Am I worried about nothing? I know that SQL databases can hold almost unlimited amounts of data, but the problem comes from when you then want to manipulate the data, and the time it takes. If I had a table of 400 million rows, and wanted to quickly extract those relevant to a specific user, I imagine I'd start seeing slow loadtimes.